Today is my last post on Eric Baudelaire’s Anabases book and so it seems fitting at this end point to return to the beginning (which, as we now know, in any anabasis, is no longer where we started). A few weeks ago, after returning from New York on seeing the Whitney Biennial and attending a […]
There are a total of 40 footnotes in Anabases, all of which are found in Homay King’s essay “Anti-Odyssey”. The majority of these footnotes lead us to theoretical texts of Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Freud, Bergson, Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze, Agamden and Badiou. Several others take us to works by artists Jeff Wall, Hito Steyerl and Walead […]
In an interview, Eric Baudelaire describes one of the origins for his interest in the idea of the Anabasis theme as follows: I don’t know why this figure is so important to me, but I remember already being touched by it when reading Charles Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil (1857) as a teenager. You can look […]
Today I am busy writing my review – the one I mentioned yesterday – and so I didn’t have time to write a polished post. But here are my working notes, which will have to suffice for you to speculate on the kind of post it would have been, if I had written it. Watching […]
Dear Eric, Rereading what I wrote about Anabases yesterday it dawned on my how I cannot allow this week of posts about your book to become anything approximating a review. I am currently months behind the review of another book and taking this mode of writing on at the same time seems especially perverse. That […]
Anabases begins (unlike Xenophon’s Anabasis) with a preface, of sorts, written by Morad Montazami. In this brief text (‘Coming Back, Coming Up, Coming About’), the first third of which acts as the blurb for the book, split between the inside front and back cover flaps, Montazami offers a series of suggested strategies for making our […]
Paul Celan had two sons: the elder was named Francois, and the younger Eric. François died shortly after birth, but Eric was very close to his father until the poet’s suicide in 1970. In July 1959, when Celan, his wife and the 5 year-old Eric visited Sils-Maria in the Swiss alps, the poet planned to […]
For the next seven days I am going to document my experience reading French artist Eric Baudelaire’s book Anabases (as well as Xenophon and, perhaps Arrian). Here is the blurb (written by Morad Montazami) so you have some idea of what’s in store: This book is not for reading but for wandering. Its lines do […]